Crown of Oblivion

by Julie Eshbaugh

  I stumble along, guided by the sounds of his racing feet, realizing too late the obvious reason why a person would risk running through this pitch-black wood, with so many obstacles hidden in the underbrush. Behind me, I hear a grunting that’s almost human, but not human enough. Something is pursuing me, grunting and snorting and trampling the ground under four feet. I lose track of the sound of the racer in front of me when I turn and find myself face-to-face with the charging boar.

  Vaulting off the path, I hurdle over low scrubs and downed branches, until my forehead connects with something hard. It stuns me for a moment, until I realize I’ve walked right into the thing I need the most—a low tree limb.

  I throw a leg over and lift myself off the ground, my feet barely clearing the head of the boar as he tears across the ground. His head collides with the tree with such force, the trunk shudders and I almost lose my grip. Moonlight glows in the boar’s upturned eyes as he watches me climb.

  Now that I’m high enough to see him clearly, I huff out a sigh of relief. He’s huge—maybe six hundred pounds—and even in the dark I can see the long white tusks that jut out from his jaw. He lowers his head and turns in place, but then a loud snap draws his attention up again. The branch I’m crouching on is cracking. Another snap and it sags under me. I reach for the branch above my head, but it’s thin and I fear it won’t hold me.

  But then a series of shots rings out like tiny explosions, bang bang bang, followed by shouts, and the boar’s broad back disappears into the dark underbrush.

  I draw a deep breath, clamp my hands tight around the tree trunk, and start to climb down, searching the ground for the hunter who fired the shots. Something ahead of me on the path gets caught up in a splash of moonlight, the way an actor gets caught up in a spotlight on the stage. It’s the dark-haired racer I’d seen earlier, and I realize all at once that he is standing right where I was when I thought I might be walking into a hunter’s trap.

  Then he disappears again into shadow, rustling through the underbrush, until his careless rustling is cut off by the sound of a single shot.

  He stumbles in and out of the light; he’s there . . . and then not there. He’s back on the path, stumbling like a drunk, then tumbling into the shadows again.

  Before I know it, my feet are on the ground and I’m moving headlong through the darkness, without giving a thought to boars or hunters or guns. All I can think of is the face of the boy in the roadhouse and the way I had felt when the stranger in the desert told me that my brother was dead.

  When I reach him, someone is leaning over him—a man with a dark vest and a wool cap and a rifle in his hand—but when he hears me approach he takes off. He’s either in a hurry to find an actual boar to shoot, or he’s in a hurry to avoid having to answer for what he’s done.

  As if anyone would care. As if anyone would hold him accountable for the death of a racer. Someone so insignificant. Someone who is not expected to live anyway.

  Jayden’s words come back to me: It’s just one more way for them to torture us. Could he be right? Could the Race of Oblivion—this one thing I’ve put all my hope in—be nothing but a trap?

  “Marlon,” I mutter as I move closer, taking in his gangly legs and his dark hair, his young body facedown in the dirt. “Marlon, I am so sorry,” I say as I lift his head and pull it into my arms. He’s bleeding from a chest wound, his tunic wet and sticky in the front and in the back, and he turns his dark eyes to my face as his breath comes in halting, stuttering gasps.

  Twenty-Five

  Damp hair sticks to his forehead, and I brush it from his eyes, and that’s when I see that the racer looking up at me is not the boy from the roadhouse who mimicked me. It’s the boy I fought at the lighthouse, the one with the tree-trunk arms. And this boy is too big and too old and too strong to be the boy that Jayden described.

  It’s not Marlon.

  Not Marlon, not Marlon, not Marlon. Whether Marlon is alive or dead, at least he is not going to die in my arms before the sun comes up this morning.

  But this young man is.

  Because there is so much blood. It’s on his tunic, on his pants, and on my dress. When I slide a hand out from under him, a warm puddle of it pools in my palm. It’s too much. I’m not sure the exact quantity of blood a person can lose and still live, but I know this is too much.

  “What’s your name?” I ask him. I touch his hand. His skin is cool, and he doesn’t grip my hand back.

  “Knox,” he says. His breath is shallow, his voice so low I can barely hear him over the crickets when he says his name.

  But I do hear him. I hear that his name is Knox, and I vow that I will remember it. And if I survive this horrific ordeal, I vow I will find his family, and I will tell them that I was with him when he died, and I will tell them that he was brave.

  He’s such a young kid. He might be fifteen. Maybe even younger. Soft hairs shade the corners of his upper lip. A mustache that will never grow in.

  “This has been a long night,” he says, and I press my lips between my teeth when the tears sting the backs of my eyes. Tears cannot help him. They can’t help me. They’re useless, so I blink them away. “I think I’m going to get some rest,” he says.

  I don’t answer him, because my voice might break and I don’t want him to know how grim his situation is. So I gather his arms up and hold him tight, and I nod, and he closes his eyes. I hold him there, maybe one more minute, maybe two.

  And then he dies.

  Not my Marlon, but somebody’s.

  I set his head down on the ground as gently as I can, wishing I could do more for him, but knowing that there are worse places to die than this moonlit wood. I feel bad about it, but I wipe the blood from my hands onto his pants. I know his body will almost certainly become food for this pack of boars, but I try not to think about that. He’s dead, and I might be next—that’s the bare truth—so I push myself to climb to my feet and start moving again.

  The sun is still below the horizon when I reach a road of packed dirt that leads to the broad wooden gate in the wall. Behind the wall, stone buildings climb the shadowy hillside. The steep streets are lit by a few flickering gas lamps, but it’s a small village and all the shutters are closed against the night. Nothing and no one stir. On this side of the wall, the gate is illuminated by moonlight, but its color is only a dull brown.

  Still, I remind myself that things look quite different in the daylight.

  Behind my back, not far within the wood, I can still hear the occasional squeal of a cornered boar and the unmistakable ring of gunfire. My chest feels heavy, as if my heart were soaked in grief. The skin between my fingers is still sticky with Knox’s blood, and if I picture his face, I still feel the shiver that ran through me when I realized he wasn’t Marlon.

  I can’t just stand here, listening to gunfire and wondering if another racer has been shot. Thankfully, I have somewhere else to go.

  The line of the wall runs perpendicular to the road, and I follow it deeper into the trees until I come to a clearing and the two dormitories built of logs, just like Jayden described them to me. The hillside overlooking them has been clear-cut of trees, and I remember that Jayden called Falling Leaf a lumber town.

  As Jayden promised, it’s easy to distinguish the dorm for Outsiders, which looks like a windowless prison, from the dorm for the taskmasters, which looks like a lodge.

  I climb in through an unlatched window and stand still to wait for the feelings of people nearby. It’s as quiet as a tomb once the window shuts out the breeze and the chirping crickets. I wait, but I notice nothing. No icy fear or pungent lies. If people are here, everyone must be asleep, at least on this floor.

  As I pass by one door after another, with a sleeping Enchanted taskmaster behind each one, I can’t help but think of the five Outsiders Jayden says died here last week. Are the people responsible sleeping just a few feet away? How do they sleep so well, knowing what they’ve done?

  They must have nightmares.
I know I would.

  In the center of the floor I find a dining room, and it takes a long time for my eyes to adjust, but enough moonlight filters through skylights for me to notice a wide bookshelf covering one wall. I know I need to hurry, but I can’t help but let my fingers trail across the spines, stopping when I find a book I think might come in handy. It’s too dark for me to thumb through it, but ATLAS spelled out in black lettering against a white background gives me hope that it will help me find my way around Lanoria’s roads, rivers, and railways.

  I slide it into my bag and pull out the silver case Jayden gave me. Though the middle of the room is crowded with cafeteria-style tables and chairs, the corners are more inviting, crowded with padded recliners and cozy couches in clusters near the bookshelves. It’s easy for me to find a place to tuck the case, beneath an overstuffed love seat. If people gather in this room to have intimate conversations—to share secrets—this is where they would sit.

  I’m almost back to the window when I feel curiosity behind me. I turn and find a small Outsider woman, not quite old enough to be my mother but old enough to be my aunt, just a few feet behind me, holding a dripping mop. Her embed flashes in the dark, and there’s a faint scent of bleach about her. “You’re quiet,” I say.

  She only nods, as if to prove how quiet she can be.

  “Don’t tell anyone I was here, all right?” I turn away, wondering if it’s at all possible she won’t, and wondering if it even matters if she does, when she speaks.

  “Are you Astrid?”

  I’m not sure what to say, so I just say, “I am.”

  “Is this part of the race? Is there a clue inside this dormitory?”

  “I thought there was,” I say, yearning to get back outside. I shuffle my feet like a nervous child. But this is a good cover story, so I add, “But I was wrong.”

  “Would you do something for me?” she asks.

  “I have to go,” I say. “The sun will be coming up soon.”

  She has an apron tied around her waist, and from its pocket she tugs a piece of paper that’s been folded down to fit. She unfolds it and turns it toward me so that I can see that it’s an article from a newspaper, with the photograph of me perched on the ledge outside the window of the lighthouse, the same picture I saw on the Enchanted man’s comm at the dance hall.

  “I read about your papa dying, and how you and your brother had both entered the race,” she says. She keeps her eyes on the floor between us, as if I were someone important, which makes me feel embarrassed, because I’m not. “My papa died too, so I feel a little bit of a kinship with you. Sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you,” I say, “but I have to go—”

  “I’ve been following your progress,” she continues. “I knew you would come here—”

  “Wait.” I need to climb out this window, but this statement rattles me. “You knew I was coming to this building?”

  “No, I knew you were coming to Falling Leaf. You were seen at the outpost, and everyone says the next clue from there points to our village gate—”

  “How does everyone know that? The clue was in the desert—”

  “It’s in the news, on account of you and your brother being known for what happened at the Apple Carnival. I guess a newspaperman saw you at that clue—the one that points to our little village—and he took your picture and wrote a follow-up story on you. I don’t have that one though.”

  Mr. Arrogance . . . I almost can’t believe it. But if it’s truly common knowledge that the next clue will be revealed at the village gate at dawn, and if the Enchanted Authority is truly looking for a female racer who uses Enchanted magic, I guess when the sun comes up, they’ll know right where to find me.

  “I gotta go,” I say again.

  I turn toward the window, feeling somewhat self-conscious about climbing out, but not wanting to risk the door, when she says, “Wait. The favor I wanted to ask you . . .”

  I whirl around, the refusal on my lips, when she holds out the newspaper article about me and a pen. “Would you sign this?”

  “I . . .”

  Maybe it’s because I don’t want to embarrass her by refusing; maybe it’s because I don’t want to embarrass myself. Maybe it’s because I realize I could die at any minute, and maybe this signature on my picture will be worth something to this woman if I do. Whatever my reasons, I take the paper and pen and scrawl my name. Just my first name. I’m uncomfortable with how happy she is to receive it, and how she insists that I keep the pen. “In case you need it,” she says.

  I’m out the window before she can say anything else.

  The sky is brightening in the east as I head back to the gate. When it’s just within sight, I choose a tall pine tree with low branches and climb up to where I can see without being seen. As I feared, there’s a cluster of officers of the Enchanted Authority just beside the road, huddled over steaming paper cups. Either they don’t expect me or they think it’s too early, because one shines a battery light between the trees from time to time, but if anything, the whole group appears disinterested. I don’t see anyone else, but I feel them—scattered pinpoints of nerves and anticipation. I’m not sure how many are here, but there are other racers staying out of sight among the trees.

  When the sun brushes the undersides of the leaves and reaches out to caress the face of the village gate, the officers finally go quiet. It’s just an old wooden gate to a far-flung village, and yet nothing could tear my eyes from it right now.

  As we all watch, the face of the gate goes from brown to russet, and then, as the sun sits on the edge of the world like a burning ball, the gate glows a vibrant purple, like a perfectly ripe grape, or the skin of a plum. But not for long. The sun pushes higher, clearing the horizon, and in full light, the face of the gate glows red.

  But for that thin moment, just as the sun came up, it was purple.

  The officers continue to mill around, surely discontent with this assignment, and before long they crumple their cups in their fists. The one with the battery light gives the trees one more sweep, and for a moment I worry he will actually find me, but he’s not really paying attention. Behind him, the other officers have already ducked under the gate, which is being slowly raised and is halfway up.

  The last officer turns, but then a sound comes from the trees. A muffled cough. The officer hesitates.

  Pivoting, he steps into the trees. Sunlight stretches along the ground, but the foliage around me is still in shadow, until he sweeps his light upward. It skims an inch below my left foot. I hold my breath. The officer steps closer and the light sweeps back, higher this time, when a racer drops to the ground in front of me. The officer turns toward him, and he crouches, wide-eyed, under his light.

  It’s the ginger-haired racer. I cringe at the sight of him, remembering that Marlon had been with him at the roadhouse. I want to beat all the other racers, but none as much as I want to beat him.

  He brushes himself off. The officer watches him but doesn’t try to stop him when he turns and heads through the open gate.

  Once he’s gone, others emerge from under the trees—the small woman with the big boots, a squat man I remember from outside the lighthouse. When these have followed the ginger-haired racer into town, the officer lingers, gives the trees one more sweep with his light, and then heads through the gate.

  Once they’ve all gone, I stay in the tree, but I shrug my bag from my shoulder and page through the atlas. There are many small towns with many strange names, but none of them seem to have anything to do with purple.

  Will Jayden be able to help me with this clue? I promised to meet him at dawn outside the village gate, but I can’t wait much longer. I climb down to the ground, ready to leave, and find him standing right beneath me, hidden in the shadows.

  I startle at the sight of him, and he shakes his head. “I thought you could feel the presence of people.”

  “I can,” I whisper, leading him away from the trees. “But there are still other people
here.” He glances over my shoulder. “Other racers,” I add.

  His eyes move over the trees and he draws me closer to the village wall. “First things first,” he murmurs. “Were you able to hide the case?”

  “Of course,” I say.

  He smiles at this, the first truly sincere smile I’ve seen on him. I’ve seen him smirk, and I’ve seen him with a crafted thing that’s supposed to be a smile, but this is the first genuine expression of happiness he’s shown me.

  “And no one saw you?”

  I think of the Outsider woman, and the autograph I gave her, and the promise she gave me to keep our meeting a secret. “No one.”

  “Well, I suppose you’re going to want some help with that clue. . . .” He glances sideways at me and then at the gate, and then back in the direction of his train. “I know you’ve decided not to come with me. Otherwise, why would you be flipping through that atlas?”

  I glance down at the incriminating book in my hand. “I have to—”

  “Save it!” he snaps. I don’t appreciate being scolded, even by my own brother, but then he calms down and adds in a whisper, “It’s the Amaranthine Forest.”

  “What?” Noises come from beyond the gate—the whir of engines and the murmur of voices. The Village of Falling Leaf is waking up. I need to get moving.

  “The clue,” Jayden breathes into my ear. “Amaranthine is a shade of purple. The clue refers to the Amaranthine Forest. There’s a research station there, where they study native species. The entrance is just north of this village.”

  “Thank you,” I say, probably too softly and without looking at him. I can feel his anger, and frankly, it hurts too much to look him in the eye.

  “Keep your guard up. An Enchanted Authority train showed up on the tracks just before dawn. A bunch of racers jumped down when it stopped, obviously stowaways. I guess the word is out that the Authority is following you.”

  “I guess,” I say.